So I discovered the Wayback Machine. Apparently it's trawled the internet for the last gazillion years and has archived over one trillion pages. If you have urls, even if they are no longer extant, it's not particularly intuitive, but relatively straightforward to search for them, but if you have only a vague memory of a blog site that you used to write for, it's much harder. And not helped by the fact that the site went through several domain names before it bit the dust.
But noted for posterity, and the fact that it took me a good hour or more to navigate to them:
These are two different snapshots for the blog I used to write for way back between 2011 and 2015. You can see how different they are visually as the site obviously went through a revamp. at some point before it was discontinued. Not all of my blogs are available from either home page, so clearly the snapshots aren't perfect, and some of the links don't work at all, but they are there to be found and proof of the idea that anything posted online is available forever.
It's an archive, so not all the links work, but at least I have rescued most of my work, including the elusive tortoise.
ONE
Re-Kindling the Passion
Originally published February 2011
I’ve realised over the years that publishable quality does not equal commercial viability. In other words, it doesn’t matter how well you can write or how good your story is, unless a publisher can directly equate your potential book to sales – lots of sales – then a debut author doesn’t stand a chance in the 21st century. It’s a hard lesson to learn when you’ve written for pleasure since primary school and when all you’ve ever wanted to be is a “published” writer.
But what if the story you have to tell doesn’t fit the industry definition of commercial viability? There is the small-press – independents have flourished in the era of print-on-demand, since short print runs can be affordable and even profitable with low overheads. There’s also the DIY approach – if you have the money and simply want a real book in your hands that you can give to family and friends, then as long as you go in with your eyes open, I don’t see any harm. And now there is e-publishing.
My dad bought me a kindle a couple of weeks ago. My husband and teenage daughter are really rather unimpressed. “Does it play games?” No. “Can you get on facebook?” No. “Is it colour?” No. And off they go to get out the Wii. But for me, it means I have access to lots of books I’d never really considered reading before. For the first time, I can read what I choose, rather than what a publishing industry gatekeeper has chosen for me. Of course, there may be – and very often is – a lack of quality. Many of these books haven’t been edited and it’s true that anybody can upload pretty much anything. But I can read a free sample first and a lot of kindle books are less than a pound to buy, so what have I really lost if I come across a bad apple? I’ve paid £6.99 for paperbacks before now and not been able to finish them. And some of my friends who are writers and have never managed to secure that elusive contract are right up there near the top of the kindle best-sellers lists.
Then last week, I had an epiphany of sorts. What was to stop me from following this route? After many years of being told I can write but I’m not commercial or marketable, why couldn’t I produce an e-book? No cost outlay, no overheads – nothing to lose. I could either leave my story languishing on the hard disk of my computer or I could e-publish. Put-up or shut-up as the saying goes. So I did. Amazon’s kindle format seems to be the market leader at the moment so I decided to go that route – I may try other formats at some point. I have no interest as yet in self-publishing in hardcopy – hey, I’m still the eternal optimist that somebody may want to buy those rights! But I asked an incredibly talented friend to design me a cover, threw it all together in a word document, agonised over styles, bookmarks and hyperlinks, set up an account with Amazon and finally pushed the button.
I don’t write chick-lit or other fluffy stuff. I do write fantasy (a different story for other websites), but this book is crime. Not whodunit police-procedural, but more will-they-survive psychological thriller. It’s not nice and it’s not pretty. Very few of my work colleagues know I have a secret life as a writer and even my parents have no idea what I write about. They will now. And now it’s up to the readers – they will decide if they want to pay for my books. If they like them then hopefully they'll leave some good reviews and tell their friends. If they don't, well I'm no worse off than I was before, am I?
Let’s see what happens.
TWO
All About Ebooks
Originally published March 2011
Six weeks into this ebook experiment and I’ve learned a few things:
Edit, edit and edit some more. There are some shockingly bad ebooks out there. You may have seen the book review blog that went viral recently, where some poor woman criticised a reviewer for picking up on bad grammar. Rather than saying thank you and uploading corrections – or at least making a quiet and dignified exit – she stood her ground and insisted she was right, before descending into unpleasantness. Bad move. All publicity is most definitely not good publicity, although I’m sure the reviewer’s blog has a lot more followers now than it did before.
Keep the price low. Amazon’s 70% royalty rate may look attractive, but 70% of low sales is generally less than 35% of better sales. There is an argument that says everything is worth what you pay for it and there are readers who think cheap books will automatically be rubbish. But on the other hand there are a lot more readers out there who simply won’t pay paperback prices for an unknown author. 70p is about the lowest you can price on Amazon.co.uk, depending on the $ exchange rate, as it’s pegged to the lowest price of 99c on the US Amazon.com site – for this price, many readers will take a chance. And you still make 35%.
Edit. Did I say that already? Send your book in html format to your kindle and this is how it will appear to buyers. Play with the layout until it looks right. Resist the temptation to overload the front of your book with dedications, quotes and reviews – not only does it look amateur, it will cut into the % of free sample readers can download before they buy, and nobody will buy a book when the free sample consists of what your dad and Auntie Mabel thought.
Network. You have to let the world know your baby has been born. Join discussions on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. Promote other people’s books – be generous. It’s all karma. Join the kindleboards forum, goodreads, facebook groups – anywhere to spread the word. Get involved in conversations but resist the temptation to yell ME, ME, ME at every opportunity. Once a day is enough. I did a promotional event at work recently with a few other writers. I work in a police headquarters (appropriate for a thriller) and we had a stand in the canteen with books for sale. Even though I only had some rather naff cards with a url on, I made an impression. Work colleagues got interested, my blog got more hits and I sold more books. The downside is that half my office is whispering about me and the other half just think I’m weird!
But getting reviews is wonderful. Getting 5 star reviews from complete strangers is simply awesome. They have nothing to gain or lose from being honest and no vested interest in being nice. This is why we write – not to make money (though it would help), but to be read by people other than friends and family. There are people out there who I have never met and don’t know me, who have bought my book, read it and liked it enough to leave me amazing comments. How cool is that?
THREE
To market, to market…
Originally published April 2011
Never judge a book by its cover. But when you see a list of possibly thousands of books and all you can see is a thumbnail picture, how else can you judge what is worth perusing further? In a virtual world, there is no bookshelf, no shop, no physical caressing of a book – checking the blurb, feeling the thickness, maybe reading the first paragraph – all you have to go on is that tiny picture.
So make it count. Make that thumbnail image as enticing as you possibly can. You want your prospective customer to click on it to get to your blurb or description. Spend some time in a real bookshop if you can find one these days. The supermarket will do, but it won’t give the range and variety of books. Look at the best-sellers shelves. What works? What makes you want to pick the book up? Look at the way different genres are packaged. How does chick-lit differ from – say – Martina Cole? Then you need to find a cover image that works as a thumbnail as well as at paperback size, so anything fussy or too detailed is out. Your aim is to make your cover fit in enough so it’s familiar to a buyer who reads that genre, but stand out enough from the others to be noticed. My original cover was done by a talented friend of mine. It looked fabulous at book size, but at thumbnail size, the detail disappeared and it stopped working. I have a new cover that was designed by a professional book cover designer and I’m really pleased with it. It’s modern, commercial and says what I want it to say.
With the best cover you can give it, how do you get people to see it? Now here you would think an ebook is at a disadvantage – after all you have no physical shelf space to loiter in. But in some ways you may actually be better off than a traditionally-published book, whose shelf-life might quite literally be measured in weeks before it’s consigned to the dumper bins of history for evermore. The shelf space you’re aiming for with an ebook (at least one published on kindle) is the Amazon listing, where your book will stay as long as it is selling enough to remain there. This where tagging comes in – add tags to your book that will help readers find it amongst all the other books – my book is tagged with key words like “thriller”, “crime”, “drugs” and “heroin”. If your readers also tag your book, it will start showing up in lists according to the tags, once you reach the top 100 in any category.
Amazon ranks are calculated hourly, I believe, so if all your friends and family want to buy your book, co-ordinate it and get them all to buy at the same time. With any luck your book will shoot up the ranks. Not that it’s something I’ve been able to do since my family don’t read my writing. Sometimes life would be so much easier if I wrote chick-lit, but it wouldn’t be half as much fun.
FOUR
A Tortoise Crime Wave
Originally published November 2011
Today’s Daily Mail says there’s a tortoise crimewave. No they’re not armed and dangerous, hanging around street corners and mugging old ladies; they are apparently being stolen in ever-increasing numbers, though nobody is quite sure why. It’d take a lot of tortoises to make a fur coat – or a suit of armour – and what do you do with one if you receive one as stolen goods? “And in my rare creature display, I have a spur-thighed (no, I’m not making this up) tortoise. Oh no, actually it’s just a rock …”
But it makes me think – why are we so fascinated by crime? We read about it, we watch films and television series about it, we write about it – we even attend conventions and conferences celebrating it. Well maybe not celebrating the actual crimes, but the way we react to the crimes, true or fictional. Take true-crime. There have been many books written about Jack the Ripper, the Yorkshire Ripper and many other serial killers. Why? Is it because we want to learn how the mind of such a twisted person works, so we can recognise it in the future? Is it because we want to see if – given the evidence presented – we could have come to a different conclusion from the police. Do we look for elements of ourselves or others? Or are we compartmentalising the evil in the world – putting it away in a box so we don’t let it spill over into our daily lives? I did a course in criminal psychology last year and it was fascinating looking at criminal profiling and how subjective the whole process can be.
Fictional crime: I’m not talking about police procedurals, cosy mysteries or whodunnits where the nasty stuff is over by the time you open the book or start watching the film. I’m talking about films and books about the crime itself – its perpetration, resolution and aftermath. The novel Still Missing caused an outcry on publication in America with claims that it was ‘torture porn’, that the sexual violence was gratuitous (I disagree) and that the morals of the nation were in decline. I remember watching Prime Suspect on television a while back and there were some quite horrific crimes. Even Cheshire soap Hollyoaks showed a much-criticised episode depicting male rape, although they did show it at a later time of day with a warning. And Eastenders and Coronation Street deal with murder, kidnap, baby-snatching almost every episode – that’s the nature of soap, but it seems that the daily catastrophes presented to the characters get ever more dark and bleak in nature. Are we so inured to crime that we have to increase the shock value, ratchet up the horror? If you’ve seen films like Saw and its sequels, you’ll have seen just how far the business goes in the name of entertainment.
For me, the line is always drawn at where the torture, crime or horror becomes gratuitous, superfluous to the story and included to make a point or for shock value or titillation. That’s going too far for me. I have no issue with any level of violence in a crime story, provided that it is necessary and relevant. But that still doesn’t answer the question why – why do we read and watch this stuff? Are we grateful it isn’t our child/husband/wife? Are we looking for answers in fiction to explain the fact that people do commit these atrocious acts? Or do we want to explore why people behave the way they do in the context of a story?
Personally I wish I wrote chick-lit. Life would be so much easier!
FIVE
The Power of Advertising
Originally published October 2011
When we watch television – anything other than the good old BBC – we are constantly bombarded with advertising. Buy this body spray and every woman will fancy you. Buy this loaf of bread and your husband will eat it all and you’ll ruin his shirt. Buy these vegetables and your kids will be the brainiest in their class. Even online, it’s constant and apparently tailored specifically for me – how does Facebook know to advertise credit cards, online gambling and recipes on my page? Where does it get this information? I haven’t even bought a lottery ticket for over a year and as those who know me will verify, I’m not exactly Nigella Lawson (in the kitchen or anywhere else). Recently Facebook went through a spate of showing me adverts asking me if I knew where my teenage children were and did I know they might be taking drugs. Now, I have a fifteen year-old and it does make me wonder exactly how much online activity is logged and stored away for future reference. I’m fairly sure she’s not taking drugs …
But advertising can be powerful. When I first published my psychological thriller Hamelin’s Child back in February, I took a out a small ad on one of the ebook review sites. It didn’t generate much in the way of extra sales, so I thought I’d try one more. I went with EReader News Today and took out a book-of-the-day sponsorship for $25 in early June. The first available date was end of October so I sent my links, paid my money and promptly forgot about it.
My sponsorship went live on October 26th. It’s a US site, so I’m not sure of the timing, but when I came home from work, there was no change. Out of idle curiosity I checked again an hour later and I’d sold over 80 books. Another hour and the total had passed 100. My amazon.com ranking peaked at 180 (from somewhere in the many, many thousands) and I’ve made nearly 400 sales that I can directly attribute to this one advert. And sales are still trickling in – probably after the free sample has been read.
Not a bad investment of $25.
SIX
Realistic Research
Originally published November 2012
The other day, I learned how to hotwire a car. So it was a video on Youtube – and not a hands-on practical – but it took me through the basics and made me realise that actually you can’t just leap into a stolen vehicle, fumble around under the steering wheel and then drive off. If the steering lock is on, you risk damaging the entire steering column if you stick screwdrivers in holes, and in any case some modern vehicles don’t even have ignition keys.
A few weeks before that, I spent some time researching tattoos. Do they really hurt, or does it depend on your pain threshold and the complexity and/or location of your chosen design? How long do they take to heal? This wasn’t just internet-based research; I canvassed opinions of people who actually have tattoos and got a general overview of the process. There was even something on television a few days ago about the danger of DIY tattooing with kits you can buy online.
On to aeroplanes. I did actually have a flying lesson many years ago. I saved up points from a credit card reward scheme, and a flying lesson seemed far more fun than a new toaster. But I wanted to know how you filed flight plans for a private plane and what happened if somebody rejected those plans. Facebook and google time again – and then I discovered a neighbour used to have a private pilot’s licence and worked in air traffic control …
I’ve researched RPGs and AK-47s, cocaine and heroin (I have some first-hand experience here too which helps – I could tell you more, but then I’d have to kill you …). A nurse friend gave me lots of useful literature on medical procedures. I once spent a day researching the best way to blow up a prominent public building – while semtex works quite well, you need something to make it go bang, and a timing device unless you want to go bang with it. And you have to get it into position before you make it go bang. Whereas you can fire a rocket-propelled grenade from a distance, although you’re going to look a bit conspicuous walking around with it beforehand. Oh, and I’ve looked into the feasibility of human micro-chipping, although I decided that really was a step too far in the current novel, and veering towards science fiction. Sometimes I feel for my poor characters, the amount of torment I put them through!
The internet is a marvellous thing, isn’t it? Many years ago, I’d have spent days in the library looking stuff up. I might have had to order books and cross-check data to see if it was still valid. Today it’s all there at the touch of a mouse, and while you can’t believe everything you read, it gives you enough of a taste to know where and whether to dig any deeper. Much of any knowledge gained never even gets used, but I like to think that a scene I’m writing might seem a little more genuine if I can add a few bits of authenticity: like the smell in the air after you fire a rifle (which won’t be cordite unless it’s historical), or how you can paste little squares of black and white tissue paper over all the bullet holes in a target. I used to shoot guns way back; I was a member of a rifle club and shot at competition level in County Hall in London in the late 1980s. I also did a basic archery course a few years ago and discovered that firing arrows is harder than it looks and Robin Hood has a lot to answer for.
But I do wonder what would happen if anybody monitored my browsing history. Would I look like a wannabe terrorist? Is my internet service provider secretly creating a dossier on me to forward to the authorities? Will the fact that I’m a writer be enough of a defence?
SEVEN
Sequel Power
Originally published February 2013
After contending with Amazon’s ruthless removal of ebook reviews that don’t follow its bizarre terms & conditions, independent authors publishing on Amazon now have to deal with the apparently random removal of the “like” button and the ability to tag books with meaningful keywords.
It probably doesn’t mean much to authors who have published with traditional publishers. And in reality it probably doesn’t mean much to independent writers either, but it did feel like we had a modicum of control, an ability to influence a book’s rise or fall – when done in the correct manner of course. I “like” books I actually do like and I add tags where appropriate. I try to review when I can and leave a balanced and fair comment.
Amazon certainly seems to have levelled the playing field over recent months. Almost all the writers I know have noticed a significant fall-off in sales and are subsequently sliding into oblivion on Amazon’s ranking system. Does it matter? Well, we don’t have a “shop front” in which to display our goods and most of us can’t afford to hire publicists, so often end up resorting to paid adverts, reviews, free promotions – and facebook and twitter. The latter two are, of course, just ways of procrastinating, when what we really should be doing to sell books is write more books!
I see posts on facebook where writers claim they can get a book out in a couple of months. Really? A whole novel? Properly edited and interesting to read? I find that hard to believe. It took me two years to get my latest thriller out – eighteen months of writing and six months of editing/beta reading etc. I have a day job too, plus I freelance for a publisher and run a house and family. I could have got it out quicker, but would it achieve anything to publish something that isn’t ready? Books (mine anyway) need time to mature and settle – it’s only then you can get the distance to see the bits that aren’t earning their keep.
So should you write sequels? Many authors do it very successfully and in crime and thriller territory it can work well, especially if the focus is a detective, journalist, forensic specialist or other person on the periphery of the action. To have your main character as a professional in his or her field requires an intimate knowledge of that work area which is often gained only by having done the job yourself or having close contacts; it’s near-impossible to achieve that level of authenticity via Wikipedia and Google alone. But if your characters are ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations, a sequel becomes that much harder – how many crises can one person suffer in their lifetime? I could never understand why any (fictional) person would ever want to live in Midsomer, considering the number of people who get murdered there!
I’ve written two books now about Michael, an eighteen year-old finding it harder and harder to stay on the right side of the law. People want more, but realistically I’m not sure there is anywhere else I can take him where he hasn’t already been and back again. It’d just be rehashing the same plots and that’s cheating, in my view. Or else I’d have to go further, darker and deeper into plotlines and that’s territory I’m uncomfortable with. Yet familiarity is often what the readers want and it can be difficult to come up with “the same but new” every time. But I’m working on it. It might take a year to come up with a new twist, or it might never happen at all. Maybe it’s time to come up with some new ideas instead? Find a new person to throw problems at and see how long it takes me to upset his or her life. Such fun!
How many times have you watched a film or television show, or read a book and been just a little bit in love with one of the bad guys? Think Sean Bean in Patriot Games, Richard Armitage’s unbelievably sexy Guy of Gisborne in the BBC’s Robin Hood, or even Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, who wasn’t exactly the type of boy you’d taken home to meet your mother.
EIGHT
Bad Boys Rock
Originally published May 2014
Now I realise I’m talking from a woman’s point of view here. For a guy – I don’t know? Are there that many femme-fatale characters? Or even just out-and-out bad-girls? Catwoman might be the obvious choice and I don’t know a bloke yet who hasn’t eyed-up Halle Berry, Michelle Pfeiffer or any other incarnation of the feline villainess.
But usually the bad-boy (or girl) is the antagonist in a story, the one who we’re rooting against – even if we do secretly fancy them. What about when this character is the protagonist? That gets a lot harder to write. How do you create and convey empathy for a truly evil person?
I was lurking online recently (I’m very good at procrastination and displacement activity) and I read a forum thread where somebody mentioned they were writing a novel from the point of view of a serial killer. And I’m instantly thinking how? Now I’ve read lots of crime and thriller books where there’s a scene from the point of view of the killer – but we’re not expected to love him, or empathise with him; the scene is usually there to heighten tension – to let us know exactly what’s in store for our poor hero or heroine. But to write a whole novel from the point of view of a killer is a whole different ballgame.
Anti-heroes are incredibly hard to do. To engage a reader, you need to make them care about a character and that’s nigh-on impossible if they’re busy plotting rape, murder and God-knows what else. You can’t even gloss over it because that’s what defines them in the context of the story.
Or is it? Nobody is born evil. To overturn a famous Shakespearean quote: Most people have evilness thrust upon them, or in other words, there is a reason for their behaviour. And if you can get inside their heads and explore that reason, you can create motivation for their actions and eventually empathy for the character.
Stepping Outside of Your Comfort Zone was the theme at a recent women’s networking event at work. I daresay it was intended to be about trying new things, stretching yourself, refusing to be limited by convention or society just because you happen to be female. It resonated with me immediately but for very different reasons.
NINE
Outside my Comfort Zone
Originally published January 2015
As a writer – and especially a writer of dark crime novels – it’s something I do every day. I’m constantly pushing the boundaries of convention; most crime writers are. There’s the obvious stuff, like swearing. You can’t write crime, or thrillers or anything of that nature without swearing. Even the nice guys do it! And sex. Good sex, bad sex, violent sex – it’s all there in varying degrees, and so long as it serves a purpose in the story and isn’t there for titillation, then I don’t have a problem with reading or writing it. But it isn’t in my comfort zone, and it’s often so hard to write – and even harder to write well. When you write, you leave a little piece of yourself behind in everything.
And then there’s the public perception of me as a writer. You wouldn’t walk up to a stranger in the street or at a party and immediately start telling them the intimate details about your life, would you? But that’s kind of what I do when I write. Imagination is intensely personal and I’m writing it out, on paper (or ebook) in black and white for people to see and read and judge me on. And we’re all judged on so many different levels in life. What if somebody reads my books and thinks I’m some weird and twisted person to even have an imagination that conjures up stuff like this? What if they think a sex scene is written from personal experience?
I’ve worked in law enforcement for my whole career. Various jobs from back-office indoor functions to out on the front-line interacting with the public and the villains. Pretty much everything is protected under the Official Secrets Act and there’s so much I can never talk about. But things stew and mature in my head and events of ten or twenty years ago start to float to the top of my mind and reappear in fiction in new and interesting ways. I’m always careful to research everything at home, so I can be certain that anything I write is in the public domain. But even sanitised, it’s still me – a part of who I am. Sometimes that’s quite a scary thought.
I never started out wanting to put bad guys behind bars. My first job was as a tax inspector! But was the natural gravitation towards the darker side of life the reason why I don’t write chick-lit or historical romance? I’m sure my mother would be happier if she could take my books to her National Women’s Register meetings and tell everybody how talented her daughter is. But she can’t. Because somehow that would taint her with the dark stuff I write too! But I can’t not-write it. It’s that compulsion to play out the scenes in my head on paper that makes me a writer. Even if I’d never published anything, I’d still be doing it.
I doubt I’ll ever be in my comfort zone writing crime. But life on the edge is interesting. And I’m lucky to have a network of friends and writers (some even fall into both groups!) who love what I do and support my often-fragile ego!
In my second crime thriller Paying the Piper, I introduced a minor character, bad-boy Lenny. I never meant him to be anything more than a bit-player, but he grew in importance and became a driving force in the next book Calling the Tune. He deals drugs, was running a London estate in his teens and keeps a well-used Glock in his kitchen drawer. But towards the end of the book there was a short conversation between him and the really bad guys and suddenly everything fell into place and I knew where he came from and what made him tick. And by the end of the book I wanted to explore him further and tell his story.
So began Rat’s Tale. This was the first time I’d got inside the head of somebody who admits to having killed someone and tried to make the reader empathise with him. It wasn’t easy to do and there were some difficult scenes but I think I did him justice – especially towards the end of the book where even Lenny himself starts to question everything he’s believed in.
I learned a lot. There’ll be another one, I think, when I’ve had time to breathe!
